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Monday, 24 September 2012

Mideast playmakers waiting for a reelected Obama

Like many other regional leaders, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and Mohamed Morsi are biding their time, waiting on news of Barack
Obama’s most likely re-election.

The Turkish premier and Egyptian president realize
that before the United States president wins a second term on November 6, he
won’t let any foreign policy issue interfere with his reelection campaign.

Frida Ghitis, a
world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review, wrote
in a special
comment for CNN last month: “If Barack Obama could make
three wishes, he would probably ask for the crisis in Syria to go away…

“Unfortunately
for Obama, and tragically for the people in Syria, history has brought the
American presidential campaign and the Syrian revolution to the same pages of
the calendar. That means Obama will do whatever he can, for as long as he can,
to keep the carnage in Syria from interfering with his reelection plan.

“That means the
killings in Syria could go on longer than if the uprising had erupted during a
nonelection year…

“The Obama
administration has put other major foreign policy issues on the back burner in
order to avoid giving Republicans fodder for criticism, to prevent new risks to
the economy, or simply to avoid stepping on a landmine while moving along a
dangerous global landscape.

“A report in Britain's Sunday Times
claims that the White House asked Israel to delay an attack on Iran until after
November. Many fear that a war with Iran would send oil prices skyrocketing and
hurt Obama's reelection prospects. Sometimes history has lousy timing. And
presidents don't get to make three wishes…”

Erdogan

Turkish columnist Gökhan
Bacik, writing for Today’s Zaman, says some six weeks before the U.S.
presidential elections “Middle East politics has fallen
perfectly silent.” It’s the sort of quiet you would expect in a waiting room.

Comparing the political
lull in the region to an interval between the death of a pope and the election
of his successor, Bacik notes that “all actors are waiting for the results” of
the U.S. presidential vote. And “Turkey is no exception.”

Erdogan, he says, wants
to retrace five issues with a reelected Obama: Syria, Turkish-Israeli relations,
the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Islamism in the region, and Iraq’s Nouri
al-Maliki.

On Syria, some suggest a
reelected Obama could take a strong leadership role to bring about regime
change there. Others believe he could “at least help Turkey create some sort of
security zone in northern Syria. Expectations vary, but there is one clear
point: Ankara's first demand from Obama in his second term is to revisit the
American position on Syria.”

On relations with Israel,
says Bacik, Ankara expects the new Obama administration to prod the Jewish
state to apologize to Ankara “for the deadly Mavi Marmara flotilla raid.”

Concerning the PKK, the
anticipation relates to military matters. “In this area,” Bacik explains, “it
is vital for Turkey to obtain more sophisticated technical support from the U.S.
Ankara’s particular demand is for U.S.-made Predators that would help Turkey
overcome its intelligence deficit in its struggle with the PKK. Similarly,
serious military reform is needed, as there has been no substantive
technological purchase in the last 10 years. Turkey is without even the
necessary number of Cobra helicopters. Ankara knows very well that its military
arsenal is far more limited than is ideal...”

Fourthly, “Ankara hopes
Obama would help Turkey oust Nouri al-Maliki from office in Baghdad. For
Ankara, Maliki has become the biggest structural threat to Turkey's regional
position… Purging Maliki from politics is a main goal of Turkish foreign
policy...”

Finally, according to
Bacik, Ankara hopes a new Obama administration would continue supporting the
legitimate participation of Islamists in the region’s political power play, “as
in Egypt.”

Morsi

While it seems fair to
say no world leader has a greater stake in Obama’s reelection than the Turkish
prime minister, can the same be said of Egypt’s Islamist president?

Leading Lebanese
political analyst Sarkis
Naoum, writing for Beirut’s independent daily an-Nahar, detects signs of a disconnect
developing between Obama and Egypt’s Islamist President Morsi.

Asked if he considered
Egypt an ally of the United States, Obama balked earlier this month. “You know,
I don’t think that we would consider them an ally but we don’t consider them an
enemy,” he said in an interview after protests outside the
American Embassy in Cairo.

The State Department later
reaffirmed somewhat awkwardly that Egypt is an ally. Egypt
was designated by Congress in 1989 to be a Major Non-NATO ally along with
Australia, Israel, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand.

Naoum sees
Morsi perhaps seeking to establish a foreign policy that is
independent of Washington. “He has taken important steps that have already
raised eyebrows in Washington.”

Among such steps, says Naoum,
“were his visits, first to China and then Iran, and his participation in the
Non-Aligned Movement conference in Tehran… when the U.S. is on a sharp
collision course with the Islamic Republic” over its nuclear ambitions.

Wondering if Morsi would
normalize relations and restore diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic broken
in 1980, Naoum writes:

“No one knows for sure.
He might, especially if he felt Iran was prepared to abandon ambitions of
becoming the region’s national, religious and economic hegemon and disown Syria’s
Bashar al-Assad…

“But before taking such
a step, Morsi has to take the following into account: (1) Iran won’t be feeding
his country’s poor, or about 20-to-30 percent of his people, now living on
average per capita income of two U.S. dollars per day (2) Iran won’t return
tourism to Egypt (3) Iran won’t solve Egypt’s internal problem of sectarianism
(4) Iran won’t settle mounting differences between Egypt’s moderate Islamist
and Salafists (5) While Obama did not believe Egypt was an ally, Washington
might end up designating it an enemy.